Last night the World Land Trust (WLT) launched its new project, which has placed a webcam in a South American
rainforest in a bid to show conservation work in action and highlight firsthand the problems facing critically endangered wildlife and its disappearing habitat.

Launched by its patron, Sir David Attenborough, the WLT says its webcam initiative is the first to combine technology, wildlife and fundraising, and use the internet as a tool for conservation.

The camera, no bigger than a thumbnail, will stream live images 24 hours a day from a website via satellite.

It will be live from February 1, but at the moment is streaming previously recorded footage of a hummingbird feeder in an area where the trust has identified 32 species of hummingbird. The trust also hopes the camera can show the mammal species that live in the reserve, such as pumas, ocelots, peccories, howler monkeys, spectacled bears and tapir, as well as bats, reptiles and flora."

"It makes you feel exactly how it feels to be here in the rainforest," said Gustavo Morejon, speaking on a live link from the reserve. "It will help us very much to have your attention in this wonderful place and save this rainforest."

The project has been set up in the Fundación Jocotoco Buenaventura Reserve in south-west Ecuador, and it has taken six months to install the equipment and establish a satellite connection for the feed.

The trust wants to plant half a million trees on the reserve in the next three years. It employs 20 local people full-time to work in the reserve, which has won recognition from the national government and is run entirely by Ecuadorian nationals. Altogether, the WLT has bought up eight reserves in the Ecuadorian region in partnership with the Fundación Jocotoco.

Fundación Jocotoco is an Ecuadorian organisation established to protect areas of critical importance to the conservation of Ecuador's 1,600 birds species - about 17% of the world's total, and almost as many as neighbouring Colombia and Peru, both of which are countries about five times as large.

It buys up land that is threatened by clearance and manages it as privately run ecological reserves. The reserve where the webcam has been placed is on the Pacific slopes of the Andes where the highest level of habitat fragmentation and deforestation has taken place.

"Here we have the highest concentration of globally threatened endemic birds in Ecuador and western South America," explained Lou Jost of the WLT. The reserve is also a hotspot for plant endemics - species which are found nowhere else in the world." Jessica Aldred, January 18, 2008 10:23 AM Guardian Unlimited Blog